Hybrid manuscripts

Abstract

Manuscripts are usually seen as collections of material artefacts that are the by-products of authoring. Manuscripts are central in studies on authors and are used to disambiguate and reconstruct significant literary works. Digital scholarly editions are, for instance, hypertext systems that enable the collaborative, distributed study of digitised material manuscripts. However, digital and web authoring challenge the classical notion of manuscript as they generate traces that are different in form and nature (e.g. logs) while enabling a variety of collaborative practices. We address the epistemic differences between material and digital artefacts, highlighting what aspects of authoring they reflect and providing a digital-aware reframing of the manuscript.